Saul Bellow Quotes
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Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.
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I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.
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A man is only as good as what he loves.
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I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence.
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How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?
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Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.
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It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.
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Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.
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The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.
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Guys like you make life easy for some women.
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You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
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Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
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...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.
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If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.
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Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
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"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."
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One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
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There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.
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From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.
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... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.
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When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.
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It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.
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A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
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Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.